Serious Injuries & Fatalities

In my nearly 40 years of Supply Chain Management I have seen and managed plants and operations with considerably different performance levels. Some struggled to deliver the basics while others were able to tackle just about any challenge and excel. This pattern was evident in every company I worked for, regardless of the industry, technology or product line. Over time, I began to appreciate the need to better understand an operation’s capability, complexity and culture. Fully understanding each of these three critical components is the key to assessing the current state and essential to improving performance. Performance excellence is achieved...

Making the Workplace Safe from COVID-19: Let’s Apply Learnings and Strategy from SIF Prevention Over the past 40 years working with global organizations of all sorts on EHS improvement, I’ve never seen anything like the situation we face today. We have less knowledge to go on, more uncertainty and a larger threat than anyone saw coming. At the same time we have unique capabilities, in data and organizational understanding, leadership and culture, and we have unprecedented reason to be highly motivated. Mitigating the impact of COVID-19 is of special interest to every organization but of even greater significance for organizations...

It was 1993 and Paul O’Neill was attending his first board meeting as a Director at one of the largest companies in the world. Just as the meeting was coming to a close, O’Neill asked, “Where is the safety report?” As the story goes, no safety report was planned but the question had profound effects. It set the company on the path to creating safety excellence and embedding safety as a cultural value. Board member influence can do that — uniquely — and it saves lives while creating business value. Powerful Questions Here are three powerful questions board members should...

It has been more than a decade since researchers first concluded that traditional efforts to prevent harm in the workplace have been less effective for fatalities than for less severe events. While individual organizations have seen progress, the problem persists at the national level: Workplace fatalities in the US are still on a plateau. Experience and Capability Required Getting an organization properly geared for SIF prevention requires more time and energy than many are prepared to give. Financial resources, experience and capability are all required. The money is the easy part: Experience and capability are harder to develop. Leaders need...

In this video, Dr. Tom Krause discusses a disturbing trend. While most companies have seen recordable injuries decline, serious and fatal injuries have been level. Further, strategies that reduce smaller injuries don’t have the same impact on serious injuries. We must rethink how we approach safety improvement in general, and the prevention of serious injuries and fatalities in particular. Learn more about our approach to serious injuries and fatalities

In 2017, the number of fatal workplace injuries in the United States dropped—but only by one percent. According to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), a total of 5,147 workers suffered a fatal injury in their workplace that year. That was an improvement compared to the previous four years, but in the big picture the workplace fatality count is still significantly higher than the lowest recorded numbers set back in the year 2013. The non-fatal incident rate continues to decline, yet the fatality rate has stagnated. As safety leaders, we still have a lot of work...

About ten years ago a global client asked why SIFs weren’t declining at the same rate that recordable injuries were. That led to a study drawing on the data of six large organizations. The answers were revealing in many ways. We found that SIFs were structurally different than smaller injuries, precursors were identifiable, and effective prevention required a new strategy. As is often the case with original research, we confirmed an insight we already had, and we also found a new one. We confirmed that studying incidents as a series yields understandings that are not apparent in single events. We...

It’s been nearly a decade since our first study on serious injury and fatality prevention explained why so many companies were seeing recordable injuries improve, while fatal injuries were level or increasing. Dr. Tom Krause, with collaborators from 9 global organizations studied the problem in 2010. They concluded that the disturbing trend was the result of differences in the precursors which lead to serious injuries and fatalities compared to other types of injuries. This work demonstrated that the traditional approach to safety improvement is ill-advised. For decades, the strategy was to reduce exposure at the bottom of the safety triangle...

Dr. Tom Krause speaks on safety leadership, to a live audience of senior corporate executives. In the first of four videos, Tom emphasizes that new research has changed the way the safety community thinks about Serious Injuries and Fatalities. https://youtu.be/SF4c4K9WNJE